While it’s understandable that students occasionally miss school due to illness, doctor’s appointments, family emergencies, etc., missing too many school days hinders students’ abilities to learn. Chronic absenteeism is often defined as when students miss fifteen or more school days in a year. This visualization shows how many students are chronically absent in each state along with how many males and females are absent in each state. We wanted to view this to see if a gender tends to be more absent. To view proportions of gender by state, Advanced Math Enrollment Tab.
These visualizations represent the amount of expulsions with educational services by race organized by state. We wanted to examine these variables as a way to view potential racial biases in school systems.
We also included total enrollment by race organized by state, as it is important to recognize that a state may have more expulsions of one particular race because the majority of their students are of that race. In addition, states that have a lower proportion of students of a particular race but higher expulsions may reveal a racial bias. We cannot draw conclusions about racial biases through this dataset, nor through the visualizations that we create, but we do find these results interesting to look at.
Note: Schools that did not provide data for these variables had their cell marked with a -9. If there was an EdFacts missing data it was marked with a -8. If there was a system error it was marked with a -7 and if the cell value was small it was marked with a -2. This had impacts on the visualizations, as the visualizations are a sum across all visualizations of that variable. However, after viewing the dataset, we are making the educated assumption that schools that did not record information in one of these variables, and thus had a -9, will have also not provided information for the others, and the proportions should not be significantly different. This is still important to note as we cannot guarantee this.
Variable Explanations
The variables that begin with "Sch discwodis expwe" stands for students without a disability that received an expulsion with educational services.
The race abbreviations are:
